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DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET
A ROMANCE
BY
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
EDITED, WITH PREFACE AND NOTES
BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
TO
MR. AND MRS. GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP,
The Son-in-Law and Daughter
OF
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
THIS ROMANCE IS DEDICATED
BY
THE EDITOR.
PREFACE
A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with
the admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the
posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish,
during his lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination
to read; and his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than
discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped
offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence. Literature has
never been redundant with authors who sincerely undervalue their own
productions; and the sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own
an author condemns must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it,
as often likely to be right as wrong.
Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to
adopt an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume
which any one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful
to read. The appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings is
more intelligent and wide-spread than it used to be; and the later
development of our national literature has not, perhaps, so entirely
exhausted our resources of admiration as to leave no welcome for even
the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As
regards “Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret,”--the title which, for lack of a
better, has been given to this Romance,--it can scarcely be pronounced
deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written
out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have
failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked
forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary career. In
the Preface to “Our Old Home” he alludes to it as a work into which he
proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than he could have
grasped by a direct effort. But circumstances prevented him from
perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven years,
and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor than
upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and consecutive
series of notes or studies [Footnote: These studies, extracts from which
will be published in one of our magazines, are hereafter to be added, in
their complete form, to the Appendix of this volume.] which he wrote
for this Romance would of themselves make a small volume, and one
of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is no other
instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer’s thought
reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in these
studies. To read them is to look into the man’s mind, and see its
quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity; the
stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like that of Hercules
upon the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and cool common-sense,
controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination; the humorous
gibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules, to himself, his own
failure to reach his goal; the immense patience with which--again and
again, and yet again--he “tries back,” throwing the topic into fresh
attitudes, and searching it to the marrow with a gaze so piercing as
to be terrible;--all this gives an impression of power, of resource,
of energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired
prophets of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer,
whose relation to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may
be excused for feeling some embarrassment in submitting his own
uninstructed judgments to competition with theirs. It has occurred
to him, however, that these undress rehearsals of the author of “The
Scarlet Letter” might afford entertaining and even profitable reading
to the later generation of writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm
one another and the public. It would appear that this author, in his
preparatory work at least, has ventured in some manner to disregard the
modern canons which debar writers from betraying towards their creations
any warmer feeling than a cultured and critical indifference: nor was
his interest in human nature such as to confine him to the dissection of
the moral epidermis of shop-girls and hotel-boarders. On the contrary,
we are presented with the spectacle of a Titan, baring his arms and
plunging heart and soul into the arena, there to struggle for death or
victory with the superb phantoms summoned to the conflict by his own
genius. The men of new times and new conditions will achieve their
triumphs in new ways; but it may still be worth while to consider the
methods and materials of one who also, in his own fashion, won and wore
the laurel of those who know and can portray the human heart.
But let us return to the Romance, in whose clear though shadowy
atmosphere the thunders and throes of the preparatory struggle are
inaudible and invisible, save as they are implied in the fineness of
substance and beauty of form of the artistic structure. The story is
divided into two parts, the scene of the first being laid in America;
that of the second, in England. Internal evidence of various kinds goes
to show that the second part was the first written; or, in other words,
that the present first part is a rewriting of an original first part,
afterwards discarded, and of which the existing second part is the
continuation. The two parts overlap, and it shall be left to the
ingenuity of critics to detect the precise point of junction. In
rewriting the first part, the author made sundry minor alterations in
the plot and characters of the story, which alterations were not carried
into the second part. It results from this that the manuscript presents
various apparent inconsistencies. In transcribing the work for the
press, these inconsistent sentences and passages have been withdrawn
from the text and inserted in the Appendix; or, in a few unimportant
instances, omitted altogether. In other respects, the text is printed as
the author left it, with the exception of the names of the characters.
In the manuscript each personage figures in the course of the narrative
under from three to six different names. This difficulty has been met
by bestowing upon each of the _dramatis personæ_ the name which last
identified him to the author’s mind, and keeping him to it throughout
the volume.
The story, as a story, is complete as it stands; it has a beginning,
a middle, and an end. There is no break in the narrative, and the
legitimate conclusion is reached. To say that the story is complete as
a work of art, would be quite another matter. It lacks balance and
proportion. Some characters and incidents are portrayed with minute
elaboration; others, perhaps not less important, are merely sketched
in outline. Beyond a doubt it was the author’s purpose to rewrite the
entire work from the first page to the last, enlarging it, deepening
it, adorning it with every kind of spiritual and physical beauty, and
rounding out a moral worthy of the noble materials. But these last
transfiguring touches to Aladdin’s Tower were never to be given; and he
has departed, taking with him his Wonderful Lamp. Nevertheless there is
great splendor in the structure as we behold it. The character of
old Doctor Grimshawe, and the picture of his surroundings, are hardly
surpassed in vigor by anything their author has produced; and the dusky
vision of the secret chamber, which sends a mysterious shiver through
the tale, seems to be unique even in Hawthorne.
There have been included in this volume photographic reproductions of
certain pages of the original manuscript of Doctor Grimshawe, selected
at random, upon which those ingenious persons whose convictions are in
advance of their instruction are cordially invited to try their
teeth; for it has been maintained that Mr. Hawthorne’s handwriting
was singularly legible. The present writer possesses specimens of Mr.
Hawthorne’s chirography at various ages, from boyhood until a day or two
before his death. Like the handwriting of most men, it was at its best
between the twenty-fifth and the fortieth years of life; and in some
instances it is a remarkably beautiful type of penmanship. But as time
went on it deteriorated, and, while of course retaining its elementary
characteristics, it became less and less easy to read, especially in
those writings which were intended solely for his own perusal. As with
other men of sensitive organization, the mood of the hour, a good or
a bad pen, a ready or an obstructed flow of thought, would all be
reflected in the formation of the written letters and words. In the
manuscript of the fragmentary sketch which has just been published in a
magazine, which is written in an ordinary commonplace-book, with ruled
pages, and in which the author had not yet become possessed with the
spirit of the story and characters, the handwriting is deliberate and
clear. In the manuscript of “Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret,” on the other
hand, which was written almost immediately after the other, but on
unruled paper, and when the writer’s imagination was warm and eager,
the chirography is for the most part a compact mass of minute cramped
hieroglyphics, hardly to be deciphered save by flashes of inspiration.
The matter is not, in itself, of importance, and is alluded to here only
as having been brought forward in connection with other insinuations,
with the notice of which it seems unnecessary to soil these pages.
Indeed, were I otherwise disposed, Doctor Grimshawe himself would take
the words out of my mouth; his speech is far more poignant and eloquent
than mine. In dismissing this episode, I will take the liberty to
observe that it appears to indicate a spirit in our age less sceptical
than is commonly supposed,--belief in miracles being still possible,
provided only the miracle be a scandalous one.
It remains to tell how this Romance came to be published. It came into
my possession (in the ordinary course of events) about eight years ago.
I had at that time no intention of publishing it; and when, soon after,
I left England to travel on the Continent, the manuscript, together with
the bulk of my library, was packed and stored at a London repository,
and was not again seen by me until last summer, when I unpacked it in
this city. I then finished the perusal of it, and, finding it to be
practically complete, I re-resolved to print it in connection with a
biography of Mr. Hawthorne which I had in preparation. But upon further
consideration it was decided to publish the Romance separately; and
I herewith present it to the public, with my best wishes for their
edification.
JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
NEW YORK, November 21, 1882.
DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET
CHAPTER I
A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be
familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect,
known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose
household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a
perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an
old maid-of-all-work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and
wonderfully sluttish in attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to
this handmaiden’s characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily,
no doubt, to the grim Doctor’s antipathy to broom, brush, and
dusting-cloths) that the house--at least in such portions of it as any
casual visitor caught a glimpse of--was so overlaid with dust, that, in
lack of a visiting card, you might write your name with your forefinger
upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs that they assumed the
appearance of dusky upholstery.
It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader’s
disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe’s residence, by confessing
that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip,
and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
[Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as
their playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and
learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier
ones (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and
gathered dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble,
and tumbled laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for
the short legs to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the
graveyard, and its legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two
children’s gambols and shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick
tombs with curious sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of
which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of
eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a
wrinkle of the skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if
death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But
the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured
smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour
Puritans.
This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner
or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the
original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart
Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been
planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of
the parson’s cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the
villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould
to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In
this point of view--as holding the bones and dust of the primeval
ancestor--the cemetery was more English than anything else in the
neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and English
elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that tendency to
spindle upwards and lose their sturdy breadth, which is said to be the
ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable productions when
transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be some specimens
of common English garden flowers, which could not be accounted
for,--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English maiden’s heart,
where the intense love of those homely things, and regret of them in the
foreign land, had conspired together to keep their vivifying principle,
and cause its growth after the poor girl was buried. Be that as it
might, in this grave had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff
visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough among the hereditary
furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of ages: much had these
sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that obstructed their toil
in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had covered the faces of men
known to history, and reverenced when not a piece of distinguishable
dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told about; and here,
mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans, had been
ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and tender,
turned up and battened down by the sexton’s spade, over and over again;
until every blade of grass had its relations with the human brotherhood
of the old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to do this;
and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first hole was dug
among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little
hillock of all these green beds was piled up.
Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people
should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at
this convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so;
nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the
night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever
been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems
fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims,
and weaknesses, that have already served many people’s turns, and been
moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn of
some poor spirit that could not get a better case.
So far as ever came to the present writer’s knowledge, there was no
whisper of Doctor Grimshawe’s house being haunted; a fact on which both
writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord
having been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome
and nauseous as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself,
moreover, except for the convenience of its position close to the
seldom-disturbed cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I
remember it, (and for aught I know it still exists in the same guise,)
it did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that would
ever have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family;--a
three-story wooden house, perhaps a century old, low-studded, with
a square front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed
porch, containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down
the street through an oval window on each side, its characteristic was
decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel. It
has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what sort of man he could have
been who, having the means to build a pretty, spacious, and comfortable
residence, should have chosen to lay its foundation on the brink of so
many graves; each tenant of these narrow houses crying out, as it were,
against the absurdity of bestowing much time or pains in preparing any
earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But deceased people see matters
from an erroneous--at least too exclusive--point of view; a comfortable
grave is an excellent possession for those who need it, but a
comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary advantages.
[Endnote: 5.]
The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side
that looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and
convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted
up with bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical,
chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as
were wont to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor’s
labors, so far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or
extract of cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of material, he was
able to produce in any desirable quantity, and by the administration of
which he professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class, and to
work very wonderful effects upon the human system. It is a great pity,
for the good of mankind and the advantage of his own fortunes, that he
did not put forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then,
as it were, by some captivating title, inveigle the public into his
spider’s web, and suck out its gold substance, and himself wax fat as he
sat in the central intricacy.
But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very
exalted one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his
fortunes by the exercise of his wits: it might even have been
supposed, indeed, that he had a conscientious principle or religious
scruple--only, he was by no means a religious man--against reaping
profit from this particular nostrum which he was said to have invented.
He never sold it; never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some
principle that nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must
be observed, was not generally acknowledged by the profession, with
whom, in truth, he had never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever
assumed, of his own accord the medical title by which the public chose
to know him. His professional practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon
him; it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be
a matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to
obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of quackery
about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of mystery--yet
which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, had any one thought it
worth while to make systematic inquiry in reference to his previous
life, his education, even his native land--assisted the impression
which his peculiarities were calculated to make. He was evidently not
a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of these Western shores.
His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly idiomatic, and even
when classical in its form was emitted with a strange, rough depth of
utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we Yankees seldom
put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us; a broad,
rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red, irregular
face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their ordinary
state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features, which
those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful. As
regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior,
and altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much
increased by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual custom of
the day, he allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which
seemed to know as little of the comb as of the razor.
We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were
his intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value
of his wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating age,
or a different kind of wear and tear. Possibly--he seemed so aggressive
and had such latent heat and force to throw out when occasion called--he
might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here again we hesitate,
finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted
with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far
behind him; if indeed he ever had any.
The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
Doctor’s study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust
and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the
dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not
well be other than dead men’s almost intangible atoms, resurrected
from the adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of
housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but
the Doctor’s scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved,
each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all
barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one
most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon
the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their
webs wherever they could hitch the end from point to point across the
window-panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the
chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of
these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you and walked
leisurely across your hands: these were their precincts, and you only an
intruder. If you had none about your person, yet you had an odious sense
of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your brain,--so
pervaded was the atmosphere of the place with spider-life. What they fed
upon (for all the flies for miles about would not have sufficed them)
was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came was another
riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of Doctor
Grimshawe’s with some of the shipmasters of the port, who followed the
East and West Indian, the African and the South American trade, it was
supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of importing
choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic regions.
[Endnote: 6.]
All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the
biggest and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor’s heart, his
treasure, his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said,
the demon to whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing
the web of the foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim
Doctor, according to this theory, was but a great fly which this
spider had subtly entangled in his web. But, in truth, naturalists are
acquainted with this spider, though it is a rare one; the British
Museum has a specimen, and, doubtless, so have many other scientific
institutions. It is found in South America; its most hideous spread of
legs covers a space nearly as large as a dinner-plate, and radiates from
a body as big as a door-knob, which one conceives to be an agglomeration
of sucked-up poison which the creature treasures through life; probably
to expend it all, and life itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors,
variegated in a sort of ugly and inauspicious splendor, were distributed
over its vast bulb in great spots, some of which glistened like gems. It
was a horror to think of this thing living; still more horrible to think
of the foul catastrophe, the crushed-out and wasted poison, that would
follow the casual setting foot upon it.
No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather
over them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down
to us from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier
and huger monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the
creature had a real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but
as for the Doctor, nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put
upon him, the sacrifices he made for the creature’s convenience, or the
readiness with which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so
that the spider might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes,
habits, and health. And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people
imagine that he hated the infernal creature as much as everybody else
who caught a glimpse of him. [Endnote: 7.]